Page 2685 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 21 September 2022

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(b) the ACT Government should aim to be fiscally responsible with revenue from Canberrans; and

(2) further recognises the Our Canberra newsletter:

(a) is currently available online;

(b) is currently distributed monthly for 11 months of the year; and

(3) calls on the ACT Government to:

(a) reduce the Our Canberra newsletter hardcopy delivery from monthly back to quarterly, from 11 times per year to four times per year; and

(b) highlight the ability for Canberrans to access the newsletter online more prominently in the hardcopy newsletter.

I start by saying that if there is a single motto that sums up this government, it would be: do as I say, not as I do. This Labor-Greens government is the single most arrogantly hypocritical government in the history of this nation. And this is a classic example. At a time when this government are banning all sorts of single-use plastics, when they are forcing organisations and individuals into paperless, waste-reducing practices, whether they like it or not, at a time when it is a crime to provide a plastic straw, this government will, over the course of the electoral term, print 8.4 million copies of this glossy, tri-fold piece of pure propaganda and distribute them 11 times per year to every single household, whether they want it or not. And it must stop. Mr Assistant Speaker, I stand before you today to stop it.

I know that the 16 MLAs who sit on the other side are not so much a government as a virtue-signalling orchestra. I know that. And here is the thing: I am not asking you to actually change the tune that you are playing. You can keep playing that tune, because all I am asking you to do is to live up to the song and to do the things that you are expecting the rest of us to do.

If the Greens, in particular—and I will single out the Greens, because I like the Greens—do not vote yes to this motion then they prove to their voter base what the rest of us have known for years. They will prove that they are chameleons who preach the word of climate gods with the conviction of an American TV evangelist. But just like the disgraced Jim Baker, as soon as the cameras are turned off, they go about their business, living a completely different life to the one that they present publicly.

The question we should be asking in the chamber today is not whether this motion will be agreed to. I would have thought that it was a given. I would have thought that it was an absolute given. The question for the chamber is: how on earth was this situation of monthly deliveries of glossy newsletters allowed to continue for this long? That is the question regarding 8.4 million tri-fold pieces of glossy propaganda from a government that passed a motion in this chamber declaring a climate emergency. You people are a joke. Seriously, you are a joke.

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